Last week my daughter and I went to
see my parents at their new home on the Eastside of Madison, Wisconsin. They’d just moved into a smaller house in town
from a place in the country west of Madison, and were still unpacking, but they
were settled in enough for me to see many of the old pictures and knickknacks
and dishes, and books and record albums which I’ve known all my life. It was comforting to see them, like meeting
old friends, but there was also something sad about finding them in an
unfamiliar house, quite possibly the last home my parents will ever have.
This was supposed to be the move
when they took their first big step toward “downsizing” their personal
possessions. But their old house sold
much quicker than they had expected, and their moving sale had to be canceled
because of bad weather. In the end they
ended up just taking it all to the new place where it was piled up in the
garage and in a number of basement storage areas. My brother Ben, who helped them with the
move, told me in private about the thought that struck him as he carried box
after box of books down the basement stairs—“and in a few years I’ll be
carrying them out again.” Maybe it’s
just because I was fresh from the Estate and Stuff Sale here at St. John’s, but
these same things that spoke to me of home and family tradition have also begun
to ask questions about what meaning they will they have when my parents are
gone, and whether anyone will want them.
Our possessions can help us feel at
home, for a while, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that they are
enough. When the prophet Jeremiah writes
to the people of Judah who have been carried off into exile in Babylon, he
tells them that God’s will for them is to make a home for themselves there, to
marry and have children, and plant gardens, and work and pray for the well-being
of the foreign cities where they live.
But that isn’t the same as telling them to forget about Jerusalem. It isn’t the same as telling them to
assimilate into the cultural and religious ways of Babylon and to cease to be
Jews. They are to make the most of a bad
situation, and live for the time being as comfortably as they can, but that
isn’t the same as forgetting where their true home is, or their real purpose.
When Jesus encounters the ten
lepers in today’s Gospel lesson from Luke, he is on the road, in the no-man’s
land between Samaria and Galilee. It is
a place that no one would think of as home, the kind of place where you might
expect to find people whose disease had made them unwanted in society. And when Jesus sends them away to show
themselves to the priests, and they head off, and find they are healed, only
one of them comes back to the borderland to find Jesus. Only one of them recognizes that it is not
enough to be healed on the outside. Only
one understands that he’s been given a greater gift than merely to be made
acceptable, and re-admitted to normal society.
Only one of the ten comes back, praising and giving thanks for a
reconciled and renewed relationship with God.
And he is the foreigner, the Samaritan, the one who, from the conventional
Jewish point of view, will never belong.
The kind of faith that these
stories recommend to us is the faith that looks to God to provide for our
immediate needs—for health, for nourishment, for a place to call home, and a
measure of belonging and contentment.
But it is also a kind of faith that knows that such things are not
enough for us. The abundance of God’s
grace and love for the whole world, made manifest in the life and death and
resurrection of Jesus, is a light that casts all other, more limited versions
of goodness and well-being into shadow.
That is why the great 20th
century theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said about the grace that is
really God’s grace—the grace that actually has the power to heal and to save us—that
it is “costly grace.” Not so much because
we have to pay for it by giving up the ordinary comforts of home and family,
worldly goods and social acceptance—though it is true that all of us have to
surrender those things in the end. It
is costly because when we begin to have true faith and lasting hope in what God
is really doing in this world, when the glory of new creation shines through
the cracks of what is partial and broken, when we perceive within our own
hearts the infinite care and patience with which Christ is fitting us for work,
work that is ours alone, and at the same time shared with the whole communion
of saints and angels; when, in short, we begin to know grace, those other goals
and aspirations that we have for our lives just aren’t worth very much to us
anymore.
One measure of the extent to which
we have faith in God’s grace is our giving to the church. For one thing, there is no way to calculate
whether we’re getting a good return on our investment. Every other organization, even charitable ones,
has some kind of metric they can use to justify to you the impact that your
giving is having—so many clients served or cases won or scholarships
awarded. And the church also does the
kind of work that can be measured in that way.
But such works, as good and valuable as they are, are not the essence of
what the church does. That is something
entirely different.
The essential work of the church, the
work that nobody else can do, is to celebrate the Eucharist. It is the culmination of all the work we do
as individual Christians and as a community, which is why the fruits of our
worldly work, in the form of an offering of money, are collected together and
placed on the table. And what happens is
that all the productive energies of our lives, all the work that is represented
in the bread and the wine and the money, our efforts to make good lives and
secure and comfortable homes for ourselves and our families and prosperous
communities for our neighbors, are all gathered together into a single act of
thanksgiving. The climax of this act,
the expression of our highest hope and our deepest gratitude, is our prayer for
the grace of the Holy Spirit to consecrate our work, by and to the work and the
purposes of Jesus Christ. And it is
Christ who gives himself back to us, as Body and Blood, to consecrate us for
the world’s transformation.
Only God’s grace can make this act
of consecration happen, and only by grace will it yield its fruits in our
lives. But it does happen, and it does
yield fruit, and I had an experience of that this week in Wisconsin. My visit there wasn’t a homecoming, but then
I wasn’t looking for home. Being
reunited with my parents and my three brothers didn’t restore the past, or heal
old wounds or resolve old resentments.
But I didn’t need it to. I will
always love them, and they will always be my family, the people who made me who
I am. But as I watched my eldest brother
locking horns with my Dad, as they have done so many times before, or stood
listening to another long story from my mother about some acquaintance of hers
I never met I was also grateful that I belong to something more than a family,
something that makes me the person I am becoming.
Sharing in the Body of Christ,
making a regular practice of thanksgiving for the consecration of all human
life by Jesus’ self-offering—somehow, without my even knowing how, this has changed
me, so that I no longer am only a person in need of love and acceptance and belonging. But I also and even mostly am a person who
knows he has received these things in abundance. And
this means my primary work is giving thanks, and sharing the gifts of God with
the people of God.
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